A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Of course. When women seek to ‘terminate’ their pregnancies, to murder their babies in their wombs, it is certainly upsetting—it should be upsetting.”

  “And so, there are ‘encounters’ at the Center? Routinely?”

  “Not routinely . . .”

  “But ‘encounters’ are not uncommon?”

  “I would have to say—yes, not uncommon.”

  “Protesters are forbidden by Ohio state law to approach the young women entering such clinics too closely, isn’t that correct?”

  “That is correct. That is state law.”

  “Do you abide by this ‘state law,’ Mr. Stockard?”

  “It is a secular law . . .”

  “As distinct from—?”

  “A sacred law.”

  “There are two laws, then?”

  “There is certainly a sacred law, which does not change. And there is secular law, which changes with each new election.” Stockard spoke ironically.

  “‘Father Stockard’—isn’t it true, you are sometimes—still—called ‘Father’?”

  “N-No . . . Not often.”

  “But sometimes?”

  “I don’t encourage it . . .”

  “Why would an individual call you ‘Father Stockard’?”

  “Well, likely it would be a younger person . . . Or someone who’d known me in my parish years ago.”

  “But you don’t encourage the usage?”

  “No.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I am no longer a priest. I am ‘defrocked.’”

  “Yet it was your own choice, you say? To be ‘defrocked’?”

  “‘Defrocked’ is meant to be ironic. I applied to be released from the priesthood, and this was granted to me, after some years of effort. But I remain a Catholic, and will all of my life.”

  “You were not ‘excommunicated’ from the Church.”

  “Of course not! That would never be.”

  “Are you a member of the American Coalition of Life Activists?”

  “Y-Yes . . .”

  “And you’ve signed their public statement supporting the ‘justifiable homicide’ of abortion providers?”

  “I—I may have signed the statement . . .”

  “You do believe in ‘justifiable homicide’ of abortion providers?”

  “That would depend upon the circumstances.”

  “What do you mean—‘circumstances’?”

  “Homicide is ‘justifiable’ in defense of others’ lives. You are allowed to defend yourself, for instance. And you are allowed to defend others.”

  “Homicide—murder—is ‘justifiable’ depending upon circumstances of your own interpretation?”

  “We all believe in a higher law . . .”

  “Are you a member of the secret organization Operation Rescue?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything about Operation Rescue?”

  “No . . .”

  “Really, no?”

  “I have read some things . . .”

  “Were you aware that Luther Dunphy was a member of Operation Rescue?”

  “No.”

  “You know, Mr. Stockard, the penalty for perjury can be years in prison. ‘Lying under oath . . .’”

  “I did not know that Luther Dunphy belonged to Operation Rescue until I read about it in the newspaper.”

  “You were a Catholic priest from 1974 to 1996, is this correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the start of our exchange you’d said that you had voluntarily left the Church, and not because parishioners had complained of you proselytizing for the Right-to-Life movement, and not because the bishop had ‘terminated’ you.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Isn’t it the case, Mr. Stockard, that you were several times arrested in anti-abortion protests in the early and mid-1990s, in Madison, Wisconsin?—in Minneapolis-St. Paul?—in Columbus, Youngstown, and Cincinnati, as recently as spring 1999?”

  “That might be. You seem to know.”

  “Would you describe yourself as a militant anti-abortionist, Mr. Stockard?”

  “‘Militant’?—no.”

  “No?”

  “I am not a militant. I am an activist in the cause, but my commitment is to active non-violence.”

  “Yet you’ve supported militancy in the anti-abortion movement?”

  “Yes I have supported militancy, if it is another’s genuine belief.”

  “Not for yourself but for another? Militancy—violence?”

  “It is not for me to judge others in this struggle. It is a war against abortion which is the murder of the defenseless and it is a war against the forces that have inspired to support and protect abortion, and in this struggle we have differing stratagems.”

  “What do you think—personally—of the ‘stratagem’ of Luther Dunphy?”

  “Luther Dunphy is a soldier of God who has put his life on the line for his beliefs. The rest of us bear witness—we but ‘stand and wait.’”

  “You admire Luther Dunphy, then?”

  “Yes. I admire Luther Dunphy.”

  “You consider Luther Dunphy’s act of premeditated, cold-blooded murder of two defenseless persons ‘admirable’?”

  “I’ve said—I do not in any way condone violence. And especially against Timothy Barron who was not an imminent threat to any baby or baby’s mother.”

  “But you admire Dunphy for shooting Voorhees?”

  “Voorhees was an abortion doctor. There is no question that, if he had not been stopped, he would have killed babies that day, as he’d killed hundreds of babies over the years with impunity.”

  “You believe that homicide is ‘justifiable’ under these circumstances?”

  “Don’t you, sir? Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I am asking you, Mr. Stockard. ‘Everyone’ is not involved here.”

  “If infants’ lives are at immediate risk, the abortionist must be stopped.”

  “Must be stopped. And this includes—murder?”

  “It is not murder but self-defense.”

  “Self-defense?”

  The prosecutor spoke in a voice heavy with sarcasm, that made Jenna flinch. She was feeling uneasy, the mood of the courtroom was hushed with attention and (it seemed to her) respect for the ex-priest’s position, as for the stammer and warmth of his words that were like raw cries from the heart.

  “If—if you saw someone about to murder an infant, for instance with a knife, you would be obliged to attack him, wouldn’t you, to save the infant; it is your moral duty to try to prevent the infant being killed.”

  “Even in violation of the law?”

  “That’s the secular law. The law passed by the legislature of Ohio in the wake of Roe v. Wade of 1973. But there is a higher law. There is always a law higher than the secular—as in Nazi Germany in the time of the death camps and experimentation on human beings, there was a higher law in defiance of the secular law.”

  “But the State of Ohio isn’t Nazi Germany, Mr. Stockard! And the Muskegee Falls Women’s Center is not the Holocaust.”

  “Where innocent lives are destroyed, there is a Holocaust. The abortion in the mother’s womb is the Holocaust.”

  “Mr. Stockard, did you advise parishioners and young people to break the law when you were a priest in Lincoln?”

  “No.”

  “Really—no?”

  “Not nearly as much as I should have.”

  “That’s a clear-cut answer, Father! Thank you.”

  “But I did not advise anyone to break the law. Only to follow their conscience. They will tell you.”

  “Yet, you claim that you have not actively conspired in murdering an abortion doctor.”

  “I have not . . .”

  “And why have you not?”

  “I am not proud of my prudence. My cowardice.”

  Stockard was trembling now. His voice quavered, he was barely audible.

  There came a ripple of
emotion through the courtroom, like a current of water. Jenna could not help but feel it herself. The former priest with his tormented face had made a strong impression on all who’d heard him speak, including even the elderly judge whose expression was usually opaque, impassive.

  Belatedly, the prosecutor realized this. He sensed the jurors’ sympathies, and abruptly ceased his cross-examination. But now it was the defense attorney’s turn, and his questions were respectful, drawing from Stockard such protracted admiration for Luther Dunphy, and such passion for the Right-to-Life movement, as well as vilification of the Pro-Choice movement, that the prosecutor was forced to object several times. Like an attorney in a TV show he leapt to his feet. He spoke sharply. He spoke with an edge of sarcasm. This was not strategic. This was an error. In dismay Jenna could feel a shift in the atmosphere of the courtroom subtle as a heartbeat.

  So many times the term defending the defenseless had been uttered, it hung in the air of the courtroom like a bad smell. There was no way to ignore it, and it would not be possible to forget it.

  At last the ordeal was over. Stockard had been questioned for more than an hour. But he was defiant, he had triumphed. His eyes shone with tears.

  And now, as he returned to his seat in the courtroom, he dared to look at Luther Dunphy who had been listening to his testimony with something like wonder, and yearning. Jenna steeled herself.

  The priest will take his hand now. He will bless him!

  But this didn’t happen. Stockard passed close by Luther Dunphy unsteady on his feet as if exhausted.

  SOON AFTER THIS, the trial ended.

  The defense called few witnesses, and all of these were individuals attesting to Luther Dunphy’s “character”—the most persuasive was the minister of Dunphy’s church who claimed that Luther Dunphy was the “most devout Christian” he knew, and that Luther Dunphy would not have “willingly” done any harm to any living thing.

  How was it possible, then, the prosecutor asked him, that Luther Dunphy had shot two unarmed men, in cold blood, without warning?—and Reverend Kuhn said humbly that he did not know.

  He’d visited Luther Dunphy in the detention house, he said. They prayed together but they didn’t talk much about what had happened—“Mostly we just pray to God for the strength to understand. We are waiting for that strength to suffuse us.”

  THE TRIAL ENDED. The jury deliberated. She waited.

  In the Muskegee Falls Inn, in her room on the fourth, top floor she waited.

  Alone she waited. In terror of the jury’s decision she waited.

  The prosecutor had assured her, there could be no verdict other than guilty. Under the law, jurors had to convict. The argument that Luther Dunphy had committed two murders as a kind of “self-defense” was unacceptable.

  On the fourth morning of waiting she wakened before dawn with the sudden wish to see where Gus had died.

  She had not seen the Broome County Women’s Center which was (she’d been told) a ten-minute walk from the hotel. She had not been driven past the Center. She had not requested this, and no one had offered.

  Quickly she dressed, in her dark, heavy clothes, and tied a scarf around her head, and walked out along the deserted street. Main Street, Third Street, Ferry Street, Howard Avenue . . . Her eyes blurred with moisture as she tried to read the street signs in the cold air. When she saw the Women’s Center at Howard Avenue and Ventor she felt a sensation of vertigo—had her husband died for that?

  The Broome County Women’s Center was slightly larger than the Huron County Women’s Center. A single-story building you would identify as a clinic or community center subsisting on public funds. Its windows had been bricked up. Graffiti had been scrawled on its walls, and inexpertly painted over. It was set back from the street in a grassless space into which litter had drifted and was partly covered by snow. She had been told that since the assassinations, and subsequent threats and vandalism at the Center resulting in a loss of staff, the Center had been “struggling” to stay open; at the front entrance was a prominent sign CLOSED.

  Did CLOSED mean temporarily, or permanent? Jenna did not want to know.

  She did know that Gus and the volunteer-escort Timothy Barron had been shot down in the asphalt driveway beside the Center, not at the street but nearer the parking lot at the rear.

  Bravely she walked up the driveway. She was trembling badly. Her eyes were now leaking tears from the cold. The asphalt pavement was covered with a thin layer of ice and powdery snow, in some places rippled, ribbed. It was dangerous to walk here without caution. Did she dare to peer closely at the driveway, in the area where it was likely Gus had died; did she dare to pause, to stare at the ground, steeling herself to see . . .

  Gus why did you come to this forlorn place? I hate you, I will never forgive you. Oh Gus.

  She saw nothing beneath the ice. She wiped at her eyes, still she saw nothing. She had been imagining the figure of a man imprinted in the pavement, arms spread like the wings of an angel, a large man, Gus’s size, but she saw nothing.

  She’d been imagining dark stains in the pavement. But the pavement itself was dark, beneath the ice crust. Splotches of mud. Cracks in the asphalt, through which sinewy weeds had pushed, now dead. Blown against a chain-link fence nearby was a lacework of shredded paper, debris. She had been told (Gus had told her) that the Women’s Center property was “well maintained” but this did not appear to be the case, if it had ever been. Other properties on the block were in disrepair, some were vacant. The largest property was a sprawling lumberyard. Had her husband really died here?—and another man, here? A place so empty of meaning? It did not seem possible.

  Awkwardly she knelt. Not to pray but to peer more closely at the pavement. The rippled, ribbed ice obscured her vision. With a gloved hand she rubbed away snow—nothing was revealed beneath.

  Inside her heavy clothes she was beginning to perspire imagining the minivan turning into the driveway and proceeding to the rear—stopping, and parking, and out of the passenger’s side Gus climbed—and out of the driver’s side Timothy Barron climbed—and there came rushing at them a man with a double-barreled shotgun, already lifting the gun, aiming and firing at their heads . . .

  It had been over within seconds. The men’s lives extinguished, within seconds.

  “God, don’t abandon these men. They need you, too.”

  These pleading words leapt from her. She would have been embarrassed to recall afterward and soon she would forget entirely.

  She returned to the hotel. She would postpone for another time a trip to 81 Shawnee Street which was the address of the one-bedroom apartment Gus had rented in Muskegee Falls, where there were belongings of his to be removed . . . She had no idea how to “remove” these belongings, she could not bear to think of it. Her brain went blank and dead at the prospect.

  We will help you, Jenna. Please let us help you—but she was not hearing these words.

  In her hotel room she was feeling very tired as if she’d climbed many flights of stairs though (in fact) she’d taken the slow crankily-moving elevator as she usually did. Her brain seemed to hurt. She was seeming to recall that yes, she had actually seen stains in the asphalt, beneath the powdery snow. Yes, she’d been warned beforehand that the Women’s Center was closed. (Always the careful qualifier—“Temporarily closed.”) In the musty-smelling room on the fourth, top floor of the Muskegee Falls Inn she would sit on the edge of the oddly high bed facing the window (that overlooked at a distance of a quarter mile the snowy Muskegee River) but seeing nothing for she was awaiting the call from the prosecutor that would come near noon of that day December 18, 2000, to summon her to the Broome County, Ohio, Courthouse to hear the jury’s decision.

  I’m sorry. I don’t care to defend my ballot.

  I voted not guilty for reasons of “justifiable homicide.”

  I don’t care to defend my ballot or my religious views. I follow my conscience.

  We were in the jury room deliberating for thre
e and a half days, and we wore one another down like teeth grating and grinding but nobody wore me down.

  On the third day my voice was trembling but I said to the foreman and the others at that end of the table, what the abortion doctors do to babies you are trying to do to me. And they looked at me like I was crazy or sick or had screamed at them in some language they pretended they did not know.

  I was excited then. I was not afraid. I said, I am not a defenseless baby in some woman’s womb. You can’t silence me that easy. You can’t abort me.

  After that, we didn’t communicate much. I was Juror Number 8. I had an ally Juror Number 2 who began to vote with me. Edith came to sit beside me. She said she’d been praying to make a correct decision. We had both brought our Bibles into the jury room, which was allowed. No newspapers—of course. No reading material except the Bible we were allowed to read if we read silently and not aloud. So I would read my Bible, my favorite books which are St. Luke and St. John and some parts of the Psalms and Revelation while there were these long discussions by just five jurors that took up so many hours. They were always asking the bailiff to run to the judge with some question to show how smart they were, the female especially who was a high school principal she allowed you to know every chance she could. But I’d made up my mind at the vou-yar deer on the first day.

  You are supposed to say if you are “prejudiced” or had read about the case in the newspapers or heard of it on TV but I did not say this when I was being questioned for they would not have chosen me to be a juror, and it is my right as a citizen to be a juror. In my life I have been a juror in three trials but not ever a trial for “two counts of homicide.” Right away I looked at Luther Dunphy and saw that man was a true Christian, in his heart he had only concern for the unborn to be slaughtered. There was no other motive for him to act. This was a “selfless” act as his lawyer would say. That was the instant, I believe that God had summoned me to that courthouse that day to vote as He would wish.

  I knew that I would vote not guilty and nobody could change my mind. And that was how it was.

  The prosecutor would try to malign that man, who had done his duty as a Christian as he saw it. They would not let him testify like the others did—“witnesses.” He was made to sit silent at the little table at the front of the courtroom. He would shut his eyes and you could see that he was praying, his mouth would move in silence. In his way of setting his shoulders and the worried cast of his eyes I was reminded of my uncle who was my father’s oldest brother who had died when I was in eighth grade. My uncle had been a good man and you could see that Luther Dunphy was a good man. The more the prosecutor tried to portray him as a “murderer,” the more clear it was that he was not. For Jesus was in the courtroom with us, you could feel His presence. Once, on a morning in the last week of the trial, which was the fifth week, a bird of the size of a pigeon flew against a courtroom window—you could not see the actual bird but only its shadow, and you could hear the noise it made hitting the glass—and I turned toward Edith, and a wild look passed between us—The spirit of the Lord was in our presence.